This is nothing new.
EVE is not a free to play game it’s freemium.
What is current state of highsec ganking? - #28 by Vokan_Narkar @Vokan_Narkar
This person has excellent reasons why EVE is freeinum not free to play. Alpha is just a demo that has an unlimited time. To experience EVE at its fullest protentional you need to go omega. These servers cost serious monthly/yearly rental and upkeep fees to maintain the whole reason EVE is a subscription game and not a onetime buy is because of the server costs. Selling skins and microtransactions is unstable and can vary.
While this sounds great on paper when you actually get into the numbers, they would lose “a ton” of money if CCP just dropped subscription costs down to 5$ I like many people have their objections to this price increase. We have botched releases, bugged events it goes on and on and I get why people are angry I try to bring some realism to this and looking at this through a business point of view. I am just a simple business undergrad, but I can see the issue CCP is really in. EVE is ageing there are smaller startup games that are eying the single server space MMO genre as technology advances and servers get better there will be more games based on this. Will CCP adapt to keep up? I am not sure myself.
Doesn’t take a degree to know that there are serious issues that we all can see from CCP.